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It was bad, he knew, if he could fill his mouth with blood on one weak cough. But Alexandronin was not dead yet. The man he knew as Belasko would need a prisoner or two to continue closing down the foul conspiracy that had taken Catherine away from him.
The team commander’s attention had been drawn by Bolan, the two men maneuvering around each other, Uzis snarling and cracking in a leaden debate of point and counterpoint. It was a ballet of bullets and dodges between the two men.
Alexandronin scooped up the partially spent Uzi of the man whose throat he had crushed and reversed it into a club. The assassination team’s field commander didn’t notice his primary target’s sudden charge until the eight-pound mass of the submachine gun hammered between his shoulder blades with stunning force.
The commander folded to the ground, insensate as Bolan held his fire.
“You’re hit,” Bolan noted, ignoring the unconscious prisoner that Alexandronin had just taken.
The Russian smiled, putting his best face on the lie. “It is far from my heart, Mikhail.”
The buckle of the expatriate’s knees betrayed the truth, however. Bolan reached out and caught his ally before he collapsed to the ground. The soldier lowered Alexandronin to a reclining position. He looked for the injury that had caused him so much weakness. Bolan ripped open his friend’s shirt and saw the ugly, puckered gash over Alexandronin’s ribs.
“Lung hit,” Alexandronin explained. “Not near heart…probably pleural artery…Can’t control that kind of bleeding in the field…”
“Quiet. Save your breath,” Bolan ordered.
“Adrenaline…pumped oxygen through blood…” Alexandronin continued. “No breath left to save. I’ll be gone in…minutes. You have…last gift.”
“Vitaly, damn it!”
Alexandronin cupped Bolan’s cheek, smiling at the big American. “Don’t mourn for me, Mikhail. My comrade, my brother, I had already died the day Catherine did.”
Bolan pressed a button on his PDA. “I’ve already transmitted a call for an ambulance. Hang on and the paramedics can stabilize you.”
“It would just be surviving, my friend,” Alexandronin told him. “Not living.”
He coughed, blood foaming on his lips. Bolan stroked the dying man’s forehead, frowning. “Give Catherine my love when you see her again, Vitaly.”
Alexandronin smiled weakly. “The dead all know the love meant for them unspoken in the hearts of the living. We do not need revenge to prove that fealty.”
“What plot these men are protecting, it needs to be stopped,” Bolan said. “I’ll end it.”
Alexandronin clapped Bolan on the shoulder. “It is your way. It’s why I called you. You will protect others from suffering as I did when Catherine was taken away from me.”
Sirens sounded in the distance. “Take your prisoner, Mikhail. Those are police, not paramedics.”
Alexandronin closed his eyes, his last breath a deep sigh.
“Sleep well, my friend,” Bolan whispered, lowering Alexandronin’s head gently to the ground.
The Executioner hauled the unconscious assassin over his shoulder and darted down a causeway to reach his rental car. He left behind the ghosts of the friendly dead to their much delayed reunion.
The warrior intended a different gathering for the damned souls he was about to pass judgment on.
CHAPTER THREE
Opening up the interface to the Russian Intelligence Agency’s GUI system, Kaya Laserka noted that she had twenty-four new e-mail messages. The field agent, assigned to the Moscow Organized Crime Interagency task force, clicked on the tool bar, taking her to her electronic Inbox. Most of the mail was one form of memo or another, mostly tedious reminders and uninspiring trinkets like tenure awards or daily positive reinforcement sayings.
The header of one e-mail, however, brought a chill to Laserka’s spine.
“Catherine was murdered,” it read in bold, blocky font.
Laserka waited what seemed an eternity as her slow T1 connection, burdened by the equivalent of Third World technical issues, struggled to load the message. There was a link to a London newspaper Web site that carried the report of a brutal, coma-inducing beating of Catherine Rozuika Alexandronin. There was also an appended note that she had been taken off her life support when her husband, Vitaly, was informed that she had been rendered brain dead. The return e-mail was to a free online service, one she didn’t recognize. However, the title Outcast 1995, contained the year her mentor and training officer, Vitaly Alexandronin, left Russian Intelligence amid a government scandal. Laserka had no doubt who the sender was.
Almost a decade and a half before, Laserka had been a fresh young rookie to Russian Intelligence, and Alexandronin had given her a wealth of lessons and experience that carried her across the intervening years. Laserka fired off a response e-mail, but the server spit back a “message not deliverable” response.
The mail had been sent four days earlier, Laserka noted. She had been stuck on an investigation and away from her work terminal. She’d only just returned to Moscow the previous night after a week in the field, running a surveillance operation. She’d had no urge to go to the office. She had been tired, sweaty and hungry, and only wanted to scrub her auburn hair clean of the stink of perspiration, stale coffee and an ever-hanging cloud of cigarette smoke trapped in her locks. Laserka was as fit and trim as when she was just a raw recruit, but closing in on the latter half of her thirties meant that she didn’t have the same reserves of energy to make a quick trip down to the office after the end of a stakeout detail.
Running her knuckle across her full, wide lips, Laserka tried to interpret the disappearance of Alexandronin’s e-mail account. It was probably a security ploy on her old mentor’s part, using a one-time temporary address, then closing it down. Alexandronin was still a reviled name in the halls of the RIA because of his interference with an effort to put things back to what many KGB veterans felt was a finer time and way of doing business. Laserka had escaped the prejudice of the old hard-liners by being young, pretty and a hard worker. A short hospital stay during the time Alexandronin was offending the old guard also conveyed a cloak of anonymity to the lady agent.
Whenever Alexandronin wanted to get in touch with his former student and partner, he would create a temporary, easily disposable and recognizable e-mail address that would last only long enough for a brief, anonymous exchange. This kept Laserka from getting into trouble with her superiors, but kept the friendship the pair shared alive and vital. Sometimes, the two gave each other news of prevailing politics that would affect her career or his exile, as far as they could determine.
The death of Catherine did not appear to be a random act of violence. That Catherine and Vitaly both were targets of bitter old enemies was not news to Laserka. Husband and wife both kept themselves armed, contrary to Great Britain’s inane and ineffectual firearms laws. Laserka had noted several instances of violence over the years that the English nanny legislation had failed to prevent.
On a whim, Laserka performed a quick search, entering the keywords “Russian, violence and London” into the news database. Almost instantly, several article links popped up on the screen, detailing a violent battle that had left eight dead in the London docks, only a few hours before. The only person with identification was a Russian national. The name was not a surprise to Laserka, though reading “Vitaly Alexandronin” plunged a dagger of sadness between her ribs. She tried to blink away the beginnings of tears, swallowing hard to remove the knot of a forming sob from her throat.
Laserka closed the search engine and hurried to the washroom after shutting down her computer.
Though they had been separated for almost fifteen years, the man had been like a surrogate father to her. She barricaded herself into the toilet stall and took a seat, allowing the tears inspired by the death of a dear friend and his wife to flow. Being in the minefield of RIA office politics had given her the ability to smother her sobs to inaudible squeaks and deep breaths, but her eyes cast forth a torrent of weeping. Laserka was glad that department regulations frowned upon the wearing of mascara at the office. At least now she didn’t have to mop streaks of black left in the wake of her tears.
She could imagine Alexandronin chiding her for being so lazy and mannish about her appearance, happily giving in to regulations rather than spend a few moments beautifying herself in the morning. A chuckle broke through where sobs had been held silent and at bay. Her mentor had always been one to find the positive in life. It was a trait that the cold war veteran had developed to keep himself sane through years of Soviet oppression. The gentle memory of friendly admonishment felt like a message from the ghost of her mentor, reaching between the worlds of the living and the dead to give her a bit of comfort.
It took a few minutes for the tears to pass, toilet tissue sopping the wetness from her cheeks. Finally, Laserka took a deep breath, checked her reflection in the mirror and returned to her desk. No one paid attention to her; a pair of reading glasses swiftly perched on her nose hid her eyes somewhat. They wouldn’t have a good chance to see the redness in them. She fired up her computer again, keeping herself buried out of sight inside her drab, gray cubicle.
Laserka had paperwork on the surveillance operation to complete, and the sooner it was done, the sooner she could go back home to her Spartan apartment and mourn for her friend and mentor, preferably with a bottle of vodka. The quiet goodbye ceremony would be a proper send-off for Alexandronin and his beloved wife.
Laserka opened her notebook to enter her data into the GUI when she noticed a small warning flag on her screen. She clicked on it and opened up a new window.
“Unauthorized Web search activity, Laserka, K., scanning articles pertaining to Vitaly Alexandronin,” the pop-up declared. Laserka bit her lower lip in concern, cursing her curiosity and decrying the snoopiness of the RIA information technology team.
“Report to Supervisor Batroykin for debriefing,” a new pop-up informed her.
Batroykin was a bastard and a half, stuffed into a half-bastard-sized container, she thought. The old-school KGB veteran was five feet tall and nearly five feet in circumference, a bald little blob of rice pudding packed into a polyester tent of a cheap suit. For the illustration of the pathetic old guard who clung to the ideals that Alexandronin betrayed, Laserka didn’t have to go much farther than the bloated, multiple-chinned official.
Laserka took a damp kerchief and pressed it to her eyes to lessen the bloodshot qualities of her whites. The cool water from her glass helped to ease the burning irritation behind her lids, but not the irritant that now started to fester under her skin, the irritation of Batroykin. She frowned, looking at her eyes in the small mirror she kept in a drawer. They still looked reddened, but there was no sign that she had been crying. It was more as if she had just suffered a small allergy attack. Many of the things in her office, from the hand-sanitizing gel to shavings from her pencil sharpener could have given her eyes her current amount of discoloration.
She gathered her nerves, then walked into Batroykin’s office. The bald, pasty gnome glanced up at her, his beady eyes looking at how her skirt hugged her athletic but still curvaceous hips, eyes lingering down to her feet clad in short-heeled pumps.
Laserka cleared her throat. “You called me, sir?”
“Have a seat, Kaya,” Batroykin offered, waving his hand to a chair in front of his desk. He made no bones about the leer he directed at her toned, muscular calves.
Laserka took the offered seat, in no mood to raise a fuss over his obvious sexual harassment. In fact, she was hoping to capitalize on it to keep her out of trouble. For the man-blob’s sake, she even crossed her legs to give him a good show. It was callous to appeal to Batroykin’s lechery to lessen any harsh punishment she may have incurred by snooping online for news about Vitaly Alexandronin and his wife, but surviving in a Russian bureaucracy was a deadly chess game. “You sent a warning to me about a news article I looked up? The murder of Vitaly Alexandronin?”
“Actually, it was the article about the brutal attack on a defected reporter in London,” Batroykin said. “A hyperlink in an e-mail you opened today.”
“Oh, because I had done a little digging. Alexandronin was found dead earlier this morning,” Laserka replied.
Batroykin showed interest in the form of a worm-like white eyebrow arching on his puttylike brow. “So you weren’t contacted by the traitor? He didn’t try to ask for your help in determining the assassination of his wife? After all, you had been his partner for the first year of your career.”
“My training officer, not my partner, sir,” she lied. “How would you like being condescended to every day for eight hours?”
“How am I sure you’re not talking down to me right now?” Batroykin asked.
Laserka sighed, letting her so-called superior get a look at the low neckline of her blouse, purposefully unbuttoned to reveal her freckled cleavage. She caught a glint of delight in the old gnome’s eye, his pink, slug-like tongue glistening as he licked his lips. She spoke again, drawing his attention back to her face. “Because, sir, we have always had a good relationship. Or your approval of my performance has lead me to believe.”
She threw in her best seductive smile, then gave her lower lip a light bite.
Batroykin watched her with rapt appreciation, then cleared his throat. “So, do you know who had sent you the article about Catherine Rozuika?”
“I had asked when he first started these updates, but he evaded the question,” Laserka continued to lie. Having had over a decade and a half to develop a good cover story for the mystery e-mails, should they have been discovered, gave her more than sufficient practice to let the misinformation roll off her tongue. She hated to be duplicitous about her connection to Alexandronin and his wife, but the truth might cost her more than a paycheck.
She could always get another job, but she only had one brain for an irate hard-liner to put a bullet into.
“Any suspicions?” Laserka asked.
“Many loyal agents were purged from Russian Intelligence in the wake of Alexandronin’s exile,” Laserka said. “I have a list of four possible former operatives who would rightfully bear a grudge against him. It’s on my computer.”
“You mean this list, Kaya?” Batroykin asked, handing her a slip of paper. He had likely hoped to surprise her into revealing any inconsistencies in her story, but Laserka had purposefully constructed the list and her notes to maintain her secrecy with Alexandronin. “It is a very thorough research on your part.”
“I wanted to be able to present the bona fides of these e-mails if they resulted in something important,” Laserka explained. “I know how you prefer to have solid intelligence from reliable sources. Your thoroughness is legendary, sir.”
Batroykin showed a flash of ego gratification at her statement. “You are an excellent agent, my dear. I’m certain that I can make your inappropriate Internet usage into some vital information that I required. After all, what is your job?”
“Intelligence agent, sir,” Laserka answered, putting a small tinge of bubbliness into her voice.
Batroykin nodded, the magnanimous king of this particular cubicle farm, passing his approval down to a loyal serf. “Precisely, my dear.”
He got up, waddling around the desk to rest his plump hands on her shoulders. Laserka tried not to laugh at the similarity of this situation to western “sexual harassment training” videos. He gave her shoulders a squeeze that was likely meant to be soothing and seductive, but it was more like a mentally challenged farm boy trying to cuddle a kitten and crushing it inadvertently to death. She winced and restrained the urge to rake his face with her fingernails. For all his apparent softness, the squat gnome of a man had a grip like a vise.
“Why don’t you take the rest of the day off, Kaya?” he suggested softly. “Perhaps go shopping for something nice to wear this weekend.”
“Why? What’s happening then?” Laserka asked, genuinely curious.
“I have to attend a formal gala for a ranking party member,” Batroykin replied. “It’s mostly an official invitation. I’d prefer to have a winsome, but skilled operative with me than my wife. In case the Chechens decide to cause unnecessary drama at the event.”
Laserka resisted the urge to roll her eyes. She and other female agents had been on these “escort missions” before, and they always ended up with skimpy dresses and unwanted gropes under their skirts. “I’m honored, sir. But my paycheck has already been spent.”
Batroykin returned to his seat behind the desk, pulling out a small plastic card. “Since this is an official sortie, you can use an agency purchase card.”
Laserka raised an eyebrow, taking the plastic.
“Dismissed, Kaya,” Batroykin said. “Oh, and my preference is for red, backless dresses. And make it a good one. These are important people, and they’ll know cheap off-the-rack crap at first blush.”
“Thank you, sir,” Laserka replied, wondering how she could get out of attending the function.
T RYING TO FIND A TRENDY and affordable backless dress in Moscow was hardly something that Kaya Laserka was familiar with. She would have had better luck locating a five kilogram package of Afghan Black Tar heroin or a cache of smuggled Heckler & Koch submachine guns. She sent out a few calls to friends on her cell phone, but the circles she ran in on the few brief moments she spent off the job were equally clueless about where to find something scarlet, slinky and fashionable. Finally, her friend Bertie gave her a suggestion that bordered on life saving.
“Why not give one of your informants a call? They should know where to find at least knockoffs of big-name dresses,” Bertie said. “Your boss wants skin and curves, not a label. He wouldn’t know Dior if the designer himself bit him and sang a chorus of ‘I’m a fancy dress I am!’”
“My hero,” Laserka said.
So here Laserka was, standing outside a warehouse that was a covert marketplace for smuggled goods from outside of Russia. Though capitalism and western retail had invaded Moscow with a vengeance, despite the political backslide of the current administration, the black market was still prosperous, usually having better prices than the state-and foreign-owned department stores, as well as a better selection. Laserka had changed out of her office wear, which would have labeled her as a government official of some sort. Instead, she wore a black turtleneck, a hooded sweatshirt with an unauthorized rhinoceros logo on one lapel, and a pair of knockoff jeans that hugged her long, athletic legs. She kept her pistol on hand, in a small black leather purse just large enough to hold the compact weapon and two spare magazines.
There were a couple of burly men at the side door to the warehouse, their build and alertness pegging them as former Russian army, probably hired as much for their size as for their military training to serve this particular clandestine market. Laserka walked up to the pair as they glowered at her. “Is the store open?”
One man’s eyes narrowed as if rusted gears struggled to motivate in his primitive skull. “Are you police?”
It was a standard challenge. If a buyer entered, denying his or her law-enforcement status, any evidence gathered on such an excursion was considered inadmissible to the well-bribed Russian judiciary. If Laserka did admit she was a cop, any purchase she made would be used against her by proprietors if she had to testify against them.
Since Laserka’s department dealt mainly with narcotics and military-grade weaponry, not jeans or watches, she grinned. “Off duty. I need a dress.”
The two hulking goons looked at each other, then chuckled. “Come on in, Off-duty.”
“Make sure you give us a good look when you try your dress on,” the other said with a leer.
Laserka winked and squeezed past the two hired muscle and entered the warehouse.
Inside, all she found were empty tables. Confusion seized Laserka for a moment. Certainly the proprietors toured a series of abandoned buildings to keep ahead of the Moscow police, but her informant, Vladimir, had said that the bazaar would be at this location today. It took only a few heartbeats to scan the empty warehouse for signs of life, and she whirled toward the doorway she’d just entered. She saw one of the six foot ex-Army hulks blocking the doorway, a wicked spring-blade knife locked in his hand.
Laserka leaped over an empty table, knowing she couldn’t get to her concealed Makarov in time. The sound of the knife spring echoed in the old warehouse as a four inch spear-point blade rocketed out of the handle. The razor-sharp tip plucked at the hood of her sweatshirt as she dropped out of sight.
“You and that spring knife!” the other thug snarled, shoving his way into the warehouse. He held a suppressed pistol.
“Mine makes less noise,” Spring-blade said, but he traded his empty handle for a more standard blade, a wickedly curved jambiya Arab-style knife.
The gunman grunted and triggered his handgun, bullets chasing after Laserka as she kept low, scrambling along the aisle of abandoned tables. “Stand still, Off-duty! It won’t hurt so much!”
The off-duty RIA agent flipped a table on its side as a barricade against the pistol-toting killer. Robbed of power by the suppressor they passed through, the slowed bullets plunked limply against the aluminum tabletop. The shield gave her the time to pull her Makarov from her purse. With a flick of her thumb, the pistol was live and ready to fire. She rolled out into the open and sighted on the gun-toting assassin. The gunman hadn’t expected Laserka to take the low road, firing from prone. He had been waiting for her to pop over the top of her barricade.
The Makarov barked twice, bullets punching into the would-be murderer’s center of mass. The hot little 9 mm rounds cracked the big man’s sternum, but their impact only seemed to stagger him. Laserka swung her aim up to the middle of the stunned thug’s face and cranked off two more shots that obliterated the goon’s face.
The table barricade rattled loudly as it was slapped aside by the burly knife man.
“You’re supposed to die, bitch!” the thug roared, lunging at her.
Laserka rolled, firing one shot at the blade-wielding killer as her Makarov passed across him. She was rewarded by a cry of pain from the raging slasher. The big killer landed on the concrete floor, the jambiya jarred from his fingers as he landed. Laserka was struggling to her feet when a massive paw wrapped around her gun hand.
Training took over and Laserka let herself be pulled in closer to her large opponent. With his strength adding to her momentum, she powered an elbow into the hollow of the burly assassin’s throat. The jolt was enough to shock him into releasing her arm. Laserka stumbled back, raising the Makarov again.
The pistol barked three times, recoil trying to wrest her off target, but Laserka held on tightly, punching the last of her magazine through her opponent’s face.
Panting, Laserka denied a wave of relief that wanted to pass through her. She reloaded her gun quickly.
Batroykin and Vladimir had set her up to be murdered.
CHAPTER FOUR
